As noted, Miller may have been provoked by the two stinging immigration defeats. First, U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions III in Vermont held there was zero basis for locking up and deporting Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Tufts University Ph.D. student. Ozturk had been carted off to Louisiana, where she suffered multiple asthma attacks. Replete evidence showed she was an adored member of the community. She committed no crime.
She had written an op-ed. “That literally is the case. There is no evidence here … absent consideration of the op-ed,” Sessions said, in ordering her release. Sessions observed that the government’s actions, if allowed to proceed, would have the effect of chilling speech for millions of people who might “avoid exercising their First Amendment rights for fear of being whisked away to a detention center from their home.”
In addition, Chris Geidner (“Law Dork”) reported that Sessions declared, “This is a woman who is just totally committed to her academic career.” Sessions added, “There is absolutely no evidence that she has engaged in violence or advocated violence.”
Type your email…
Subscribe
The Second Circuit upheld another similar lower court’s ruling on Friday, affirming that Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi be released from custody. The appellate panel unanimously slapped down the argument that the district court lacked jurisdiction to release Mahdawi on bail because immigration courts have jurisdiction over deportation matters. The deportation issue is still pending. But the Second Circuit chastised the government for “dramatically overstat[ing]” the extent to which immigration courts can displace federal court jurisdiction.
The panel summed up:
Mahdawi’s unlawful detention claims may be resolved without affecting pending removal proceedings. He asserts that the government arrested him to punish speech with which it disagrees. But doing so would violate the Constitution—quite separate from the removal procedures followed by the 14 immigration courts. Consequently, even if his claims have a substantive overlap with challenges he may bring in his removal proceedings, his detention claims do not themselves challenge or arise from “removal proceedings”….
You do not need to be a lawyer to see that Trump/Miller’s arguments are not simply losing; they are engendering the disgust of a wide swath of the federal judiciary. The lawyers assigned to advocate these untenable positions are getting laughed out of court. (Recall that three different federal district courts—in Texas, New York, and Colorado—previously blasted the government for invoking the Alien Enemies Act.)
When the Trump brain trust loses in such embarrassing fashion, it makes ridiculous threats, as Miller did. Worse, its lackeys start arresting people. On Friday afternoon, the arrestee was Mayor Ras Baraka, who was peacefully protesting with members of Congress outside a Newark detention facility run by a private prison. The ostensible grounds for handcuffing and arresting him were…
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/trump-and-his-henchmen-lash-out-when